Numerical study of a 20W class QCW pulsed sodium guide star laser's performances at five sites in China

TL;DR

This paper numerically evaluates the performance of a 20W class QCW pulsed sodium laser guide star across five Chinese astronomical sites, considering local environmental factors influencing on-sky effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical simulation approach to assess sodium laser guide star performance at multiple sites, accounting for site-specific environmental influences.

Findings

Performance varies significantly across sites due to local conditions.

Site-specific factors like geomagnetic field and sodium layer dynamics impact laser effectiveness.

The study provides insights for optimizing laser guide star deployment in China.

Abstract

In the past few years, Chinese astronomical community is actively testing astronomical sites for several new optical/infrared ground-based telescopes. These site testing campaigns conducted were mainly focused on fundamental performances of the site, such as cloud coverage, seeing, temperature, etc. With increasing interests in sodium laser guide star adaptive optics for these new telescopes in the Chinese astronomical community, it is interesting to investigate the performance of the laser guide star at these sites, especially considering that the sodium laser guide star's on-sky performance is significantly influenced by sites' local performances, such as geomagnetic field, sodium layer dynamics, density of air molecule, etc. In this paper, we studied sodium laser guide star's performance of a 20W class Quasi-CW pulsed laser developed by TIPC with numerical simulation for five selected sites in China.